This is a niche game for people who don't mind a lot of downtime waiting for the game to load (or relaunch after a crash) and love to die a lot trying to figure out how to survive traps and other situations.

The game's two big problems are frequent crashes and long load times, and these issues occur together. When you launch the game your savegame will load fine, but after you die you have a much higher than even chance of the game crashing, but only after you've sat through the half minute load time of course. Yep, half a minute. After every single death / crash. With not a lot of textures to load (and from an SSD drive) and a static light map that should have been pre-rendered for all levels when the game launched, not on every savegame load. There shouldn't even be a load time. You can expect to spend 80%+ of your time watching the game launch after a crash or watching the load screen.

Some minor issues add to the frustration, like silly trigger / death zones for traps, or death almost always failing to lead to the death screen (also, "You Dead" ... classic).

The Good:The premise. I like Ancient Egypt as a setting, plus its underused in games.

The atmosphere was nice in level 1.

Using items was fairly intuitive. I like how you have to keep the button held down to keep your lighter working.

The Bad:Walk speed is almost unforgivably slow.

Load times are unforgivably long, especially for such a graphically simple game.

Level design. Having to squeeze past row after row after row of instant-death arrow traps by nudging yourself back and forth until you're in the two inches of safe space allotted is not my idea of fun exploration. Also, outside of the intro, most of the levels are just small central hubs with series of corridors on each side. It's predictable and not very engaging.

Puzzles are as basic as you can get. Collect a key and then push a button. Push several buttons in sequence. Push the right button from a selection, the rest do nothing. This might be a positive since at least they're not annoying.

Music is alright, mostly just ambient sound, but noticeably loops.

Game flow. Again, 3/4 of my actual gameplay in this is running through corridors lined with arrow traps that kill you if you touch them. If you're anything like me, you're going to die on these repeatedly, waiting a minute or so for the save to reload. Every bit of atmosphere, horror, exploration, or anything potentially enjoyable about this game takes a backseat to running through these corridors praying that you'll survive.

There are a few issues translating the Russian to English. The text generally gets the message across, and Russian is a hard language, so I don't mind it too much, but it might bother some people.

Monsters. This, like many games of its type have monsters that attack you, and you have to run. In Dark Egypt they mostly just slowly shuffle towards you, posing little threat unless you have no room to maneuver. It's also trivial to get them stuck on a corner. There was a spooky scene where you see a glimpse of one walking across a corridor in front of you, so points for that. The designs also suck, the first one is a minotaur from Greek mythology, and the second one had such a messy model and textures that I couldn't tell.

Graphics/visuals: The entire reason I bought this game was to see the Egyptian theme. However, I was disappointed on that end too. Most of the assets in this game are NOT Egyptian themed in any way. There are a bunch of assets from Greek, Aztec, and Nordic temples, and a bunch of stuff that belongs in any generic fantasy temple, but very few things that actually have the advertised theme. Even the instant death arrow traps look more like a Tiki head than anything. The only thing I saw that WAS Egyptian was a few Anubis statues in level 3. If I had to guess, the designer probably just slapped this game together using premade assets, and this is all that he could find.

I think some of the sounds are ripped too. I'm pretty sure the "pick up item" sound is ripped from Silent Hill.

BUGS. This is the big one. I'm just going to list some of the glitches I've found.The first time I die in level 2, instead of a death screen, instead it teleports me back to the beginning of the level, then sink halfway through the ground and get stuck. I can reload my save, but if I die and reload again, the game crashes.

Trying to walk past a skeleton, I accidentally used it as a ramp and started floating, glitching into other parts of the geometry.

Pretty sure I got stuck on corners/boxes more than once.

The game will sometimes just crash whenever it feels like it.

Some areas/effects obviously weren't supposed to be lit up, so they will look "off" when using your lighter.

There is a glitch in level 3 that keeps me from progressing the rest of the way through the game. A door opens, but there's still an invisible wall blocking access.

this was the 6th game by this 'developer' i've played recently so i kind of knew what to expect.and for another time it did not disappoint to disappoint!

at first glance the game doesn't seem too bad and you may even like the clumsy and childish approach in a weird way.but no. it's really just bad. if you know one of this guy's games you know all of them. everything is as generic and samey as it can get. kind of like my reviews regarding his games actually. the egypt settting is new though but don't get too excited about it.

it took me exactly 49 minutes to explore everything and finish my first run. and there is definitely no reason to play a second time. i spent most of that time looking at loading screens and waiting for the game to recover after crashing.

it crashes, it's buggy, the story is laughable and the overall experience is so bad you're happy when it's finally over. nothing new here.translation is hilarious though.

you know the drill, say with me:this is not worth ANY amount of time nor money.

Well, the game is actually atmospheric, I like the locations and their music/soundtrack. Its dark, quite challenging in finding solution for traps and it has decent music. However, it has quite a long loading, which became pretty frustrating after a few loads (because you will often die a few times) and often crashes when you try to load saved game which is not less frustrating. It would be a good game if developer try to reduce loading time and crashes.

Even by GDnomads standards this is a pretty poor game. As per usual it's built on the FPSC engine. An open source engine that was terrible even when you had to buy it. So expect long long loadtimes and plenty of random crashes. Also the graphics which are always ugly in an FPSC game are even worse than usual, as there is an awful brown 'vignette' filter over everything.

Anywhoo in typical fashion this game is all about collecting keys and throwing levers. In fairness he tried to spice things up a bit by having insta death traps attached...and I cannot even complete the second room as the game kills me trying to crawl under the spike traps.

At least the audio and ambience is half decent, but that does not mean much with insta death and insta crashes. So save your money as this is just more low end dross.